The Best of Push to Talk: 2024 Edition
Reflecting on a year of writing and planning for the future.
When I started Push to Talk earlier this year, I thought of it basically as an excuse to interview cool people who make video games. But—50 weekly issues and 130,000 published words later—it’s evolved in ways that keep surprising me.
Push to Talk isn’t really a newsletter, not exactly a blog. I’m starting to think of it as an ongoing project to understand the games industry, one interview and essay at a time.
The fact that over 4,000 of you have signed up to read weekly astonishes me. If you’re a subscriber, thank you sincerely. If you’re not yet, I got something for you right here:
But, let’s be honest: Nobody has time to read all the stuff I’m putting out. Some of it’s pretty unhinged! I get it. So I wanted to end the year with a roundup of the 12 best Push to Talk posts from this year, in three categories:
Deep dives and strategy guides for marketing video games
Conversations with people on the cutting edge of games industry and culture
Occasional unhinged essays about books and ideas
I’ve broken out the best of this year’s posts in each category below.
Deep Dives and Strategy Guides for Marketing Games
Games marketing is in a scary place right now and people are desperate to think more deeply about it and hear new perspectives. So these posts will continue to be the primary focus for the newsletter in 2025.
First up, a post that used a game developer’s viral tweet as a jumping off point to explore why some games are so much easier to market than others:
In terms of raw value for marketing strategy, this one about positioning is probably my favorite of the year:
A recurring theme in the newsletter this year has been the difficulty (and maybe impossibility?) of predicting hits:
This piece is a hodgepodge of interesting marketing data and an interview with the developer of one of my favorite indie games this year:
The follow-up to Are Old Games Killing New Games? is a recommended read for anyone attempting to make a live-service game:
And finally, I spent most of November writing a two-part series synthesizing ideas from all of the preceding marketing-focused posts:
Conversations with People on the Cutting Edge
I have this unshakeable sense that the culture around games is poorly understood. Most discussion focuses on the big games and big studios, but there’s a whole world of art and creativity flowering around that.
This is why I love interviewing ROM hackers, Minecraft modders, speedrunners, DJs, esports hosts, book publishers, and academics. This is why the first ever issue of Push to Talk was a profile of a guy running a parody corporate Twitter account that endlessly promotes the Nintendo 64 game Quest 64. There’s a massive cultural superstructure sprouting out of games, and you can’t really understand what video games are until you can see and understand that superstructure.
In particular, I’m drawn to people that represent the most extreme edges of what’s possible in games. For example, a 21-year-old solo dev who has already made a $100 million game:
And it’s not just devs that I’m interested in. One of my favorite gaming subcultures is speedrunning. This year I wrote a profile of a kid that is without question the most accomplished speedrunner alive:
Going forward into 2025, I have every intention of continuing these conversations, though instead of posting Q&As I’ll more often structure the resulting conversations as observational essays where I’m weaving in quotes from others, like this one:
Unhinged Essays About Books and Ideas
Every couple of months I write something only tangentially related to gaming and/or marketing. This usually results in like 20 people unsubscribing and another five people writing in to tell me that it’s their favorite piece I’ve published. That’s a totally acceptable ratio, so I’m going to keep doing these.
Easily the most extreme version of this type of piece is this one that I modified for publication here after failing to get an earlier version of it published in a popular games magazine a decade ago:
I’ve been thinking about how gatekeepers seem to be losing power in just about every creative industry (for better or worse). These thoughts congealed into a long post that’s about William Faulkner and the history of the publishing business:
There’s no shortage of career advice in the games industry, but I had a lot of fun writing this post back in January. I’m hoping to do more like it in 2025:
If you’re a new reader of Push to Talk, please check out the posts above if any of them interest you. And if you ever have a question or a comment you’d like to share, just reply directly to these emails or hit me up on X or LinkedIn. I’m always down to chat with readers—you people are the coolest.
That’s it for this week. I’m taking next week off to spend time with family.
I’ll be back Friday, January 3rd, 2025. Until then, I hope you all have very happy and restful holidays.
Congrats on an amazing first year for Push To Talk.
You’ve written some great stories this year, and moreover, you take the time (outside of your day job) to interview and research unique angles. That’s a lot of work!
I really loved your piece on games that lock players in. It definitely influenced how I thought of the industry and my writing.
Your success here is proof that there is an audience for high quality games writing on Substack, and a great north star for the rest of us writing on the platform.
Keep up the awesome work! Onwards and upwards for 2025!